I’m taking a break from our ‘Table Tales’ to let you know that for Christmas this year, I made a cookbook for my kids. As they’re growing up so quickly, I wanted to make them something that means they could take me with them wherever they are. Something to accompany the stories they’ll continue to share around their own dinner tables.
I learnt to cook when my oldest two were babies, mostly because I don’t like to be bored, and as much as I loved having the babies around, I needed to feel like I’d achieved something every day. I started out with a book called ‘Quick and Easy Recipes’ that I found in a charity shop. We had some absolute disasters along the way! The time I mixed up the sugar and salt in a lemon drizzle cake! Or the soggy courgette quiche, which even now makes Sean gag at the thought of! But over time, I’ve made fewer mistakes and gotten a better idea of what will work and what definitely won’t.
I’m not claiming to be an amazing or even a natural cook, I’m probably about an average family cook and the recipes are for things that I genuinely regularly make for my family.
If you’d like to have a go at a few of our recipes, then the cookbook is available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardback. If you enjoy it, please leave a review or let me know if you have any other recipes I should try.
As you know it’s almost two months since ‘Reflections’ was released for sale, and I’ve mentioned before that it’s been quite a journey to get to this point. So today I thought I’d share the start of the journey with you – how I get the ideas for my novels.
My first novel wasn’t actually Reflections, but Equality. This one isn’t likely to be published but it’s based on a conversation I overheard on the bus! One person said to another that their friend didn’t deserve to have rain for their special day. It got me thinking about what do we deserve? Who decides? So the novel is based on a different kind of society where the community you live in decides what you get. Obviously, people are fatally flawed and so the novel is the dismantling of this system. All from a conversation on a bus.
Reflections is based on watching my daughter playing with her blanket in front of a mirror. Not only this but also a little from the PTSD I suffered after my youngest was born as well as a processing of grief from losing my mother-in-law. My starting point was what if there was a whole world behind the mirror. What would that be like? Who would you meet there? There are scenes that got deleted from the final version of the novel that I’ll post on here at some point, and you’ll see a bit more of the world in my head!
Perspectives, which is the novel I’m currently working on, is partly based on what I know of my great aunt’s life and also a gravestone I saw walking through a churchyard one afternoon. It was for a man who was said to be missed by his mother and only sister. Which made me wonder why it needed to say ‘only sister’? Maybe there was another sibling that had been rejected and this was a way to further alienate them? It probably wasn’t but it made me think ‘what if…’. The novel is still a little way from being finished but I’m looking forward to sharing it.
I have a couple of other ideas churning at the moment, it’s like the ideas buzz around in my head waiting to be written down. Inspiration can come from anywhere and anything, but it takes time and courage to flesh these ideas out and make something out of them. Whether that’s art, music or writing. Pursuing the creative process is always one of peaks and valleys. It’s always worth following the path though, who knows where it might lead you!
I’m so grateful to all those of you who have pre-ordered an ebook, I hope you enjoy reading it! It would be really helpful if you could add a review.
The 4th March is a significant date for me as it’s the day that I started to follow Jesus. Reflections may not be a Christian novel, but it is about finding a way through. It’s about new beginnings. I know for many people they’re still searching for the hope to keep going. I sometimes wish I had all the answers but I know someone who does, and I’d love to introduce you sometime.
If I hadn’t started this journey with Him then I don’t think I would be writing this today. I certainly wouldn’t have the incredible support network I have around me. So many people have contributed to helping make this possible and if I thanked them all, I would be writing another novel. It’s been 32 years of people pouring wisdom and kindness into me. Sharing their lives and showing me what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus.
If you want to know more about Him, then please get in touch.
After five years of writing, rewriting and editing, ‘Reflections’ will be released for sale on the 4th March 2024! You’ll be able to buy it on Amazon in paperback, hardback and ebook versions. Pre-orders for kindle are up now! https://amzn.eu/d/iIOA3Ba.
It’s been a journey of big highs and dramatic lows! There have been moments of wanting to throw the whole thing in the bin! It’s hard to believe in a months time, my novel will be out in the world. A dream come true moment.
I’d love to encourage all of you who have dreams to pursue them and you never know where you might end up!
At the moment I’m working hard on drafting my second novel, Perspectives. I’ve had the main plot written for a couple of years but knew it needed something else. In November I started National Novel Writing Month but this time I failed to complete it. I got to 30,000 words and life got in the way. I’ve been wanting to pick this up again but haven’t had time. In February I realised if I wanted to do this, I would need to make time! That’s what I’ve done. I’m now only 3,000 words away from reaching the 50,000 target.
Some people find the first draft difficult, agonising over sentence structure and dialogue. But I love drafting. I let my imagination fly! Very often my characters do things and find things in different ways than the way I’d planned, but usually that makes the story better. Overall, I’d say I’m a planner. I know where I’m going, I’ve got to know my characters really well, I have a good idea of how they’re going to get where they’re going, but there are always a lot of twists and turns along the way.
Now that I’m nearing the end, I’m finding it harder to put my laptop away! I want to keep tapping until it’s completed. I want to know what’s going to happen, even though I know! At points I’ve had to put it away because I’ve scared myself! I can feel my heart pumping with the adrenaline that my protagonist is feeling. I want to get her to safety, I want her to know the secrets I’ve kept hidden from her. I want to tie it all up in a neat bow.
What I’ve loved most about this draft is that my teenage son has given me inspiration and chatted with me about what could happen. I’m not sure whether it’s good parenting to discuss kidnap and murder with your son, but he’s been really helpful! He’s had some great ideas and understands how important it is to avoid a cliched plots and motives. It’s been so fun to share the process with him. I’ve loved telling him what’s happened to the characters next, and hear his suggestions of what they could do now. He’s defintely going have to get an acknowledgement in this novel!
When I finish this draft, I’ve got to weave it together with the main plot and then begin the mammoth task of editing. My least favourite part. But I’ve got my index cards ready and colourful pens to help with the story arcs and can’t wait to make time to finish.
I’ve learnt through this whole process that we make time for what we really want to do. If I want to write, then something else has to go, that can’t be my family, or my work, so I have to choose how much time I need to spend looking at a screen or listening to audio books. Not that I can’t do it or shouldn’t, just that I need to make sure I don’t squeeze out my creative time.
For the last year or so, my writing and publishing partner, Sophie and I, have been meeting in Starbucks on a Thursday to write and talk about publishing, family, and life in general! It’s been so good to have a rhythm to writing and to have a quiet place (earphones in!) to concentrate and when distracted, people watch!
In the time we’ve been meeting, we’ve managed to get a book published and have been individually completing our own novels. This week is one of the last Thursdays I’ll be able to do this. I’m sure there will be other days and other opportunities, change brings with it both positives and negatives.
It’s given me an opportunity to think about seasons of change and transition and how we all cope with them in different ways. This is probably more relevant for me with one child about to finish his GCSE’s and another struggling with a change of teacher. When we get to the end of a season, we sometimes get time to realise it’s coming to an end, as with my son. He’s very ready for it to end. He can’t wait to leave school. Even though he’s going to continue his education, he’s going to be in a different setting with different teachers and less of the subjects he doesn’t want to do!
I want to tell him to enjoy these last few months of school. He’ll never get this time back and so I want him to embrace the school experience, to enjoy being with his friends every day. To choose not to let the stress of exams wear him down but to realise this is one step towards the future he can’t yet see.
But maybe change comes suddenly, as with my daughter, whose teacher has gone off sick. There was no warning and so the change has been jarring. She couldn’t prepare for it and so is struggling to cope with the variation and regular teacher change. This is partly due to her autism, but I think we all find sudden changes hard to cope with. I wish I could help her to understand that change can be good, even when it’s sudden. I want to calm her racing mind and show her the school is doing so much to help her cope, including adding a well-being day to help her find things that she enjoys and is good at.
So as my Starbucks season comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve enjoyed about this season, apart from the coffee! It’s been a time of creativity and, let’s be honest, sometimes stress, as we published our first book for Cadence Publishing. I’ve been able to edit and write, people watch and chat. It’s been time to allow my introvert side to get some breathing space. (Our house is very often full of people!)
As I enter a new season, I’m thankful for Starbucks and all that it’s represented on Thursdays for me. I want to remember how important creativity and space to think can be, and in the busy-ness that’s to come, I want to find new ways to get creative. Maybe Starbucks will still feature, somehow! Either way, I’ve a lot to be grateful for.
One of my all time favourite books is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. I have a confession to make. The only reason I bought it, was because I had a gift card for a book and I wanted to buy the biggest book I could find for the money! When I bought it I was 20 and in my first job as an office junior at a insurance brokers. If I’m honest it wasn’t the most exciting job and during my lunch break I would read my book, as I read further it became the highlight of my day! I started to hide the book in the top drawer of my desk! I would sneakily read a few sentences whenever it was quiet.
Since that first time reading it, I’ve read it through several times. I’ve read it aloud to Sean and have listened to the audiobook a couple of times. There aren’t many stories that have as many layers and surprises throughout. We visited some friends recently who had a beautiful copy of the book on display. I pointed it out and said how much I loved it. We laughed that even though one of them read it, the main reason for buying it was similar to mine! It did look good on their bookshelf!
As with a lot of novels the ending has a huge impact on the flavour of the book. The last lines of the Count are what turn it, from a story about revenge, to a story about holding on to hope.
Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—’Wait and hope’.
Having just finished it again, I have to marvel at Dumas’ skill in story telling, of holding a secret and tying things together. I can’t imagine the amount of planning and thought it took to put the story together and I hope that I would have the patience to write something so masterful.
Maybe those are the words you need to hear over the dreams you hold – Wait and Hope!
It’s been a busy week this week and as I’m self isolating after a trip to London I’ve had some time to catch up on editing.
My editor Justine, has done an incredible job editing ‘Reflections’ and she sent it all back to me shining with it’s comments and trackable changes to approve. It’s quite easy to go through her notes as she is almost always right! It’s so helpful that she gets what I’m trying to create and I’m glad that it made her cry!
But now I turn to editing my first novel that has been tucked away while I finished Reflections. I don’t know how you feel about editing, but my writing partner and I have different feelings about it! Sophie is the sensible one who really enjoys working on edits and improving and polishing, whereas I get so bored! I love the new novel stage, the getting the words down, creating the characters, making them do whatever I want them to! But editing, urgh! So dull!
When you finish a first draft, you feel it’s perfect! You want to tell the world you’ve done it. You stroke the printed pages and smile to yourself smugly that you persevered and have created this novel!
Then you tuck it away for a week or so, basking in the glow of your success. Then you go back to the first page! The disappointment is real! With this first novel, I’ve already gone through it a few times, so the thought of starting all over again is a bit like going back to school! Unfortunately the editing needs to begin with a full re-write of the first page!
My top tips for editing:
Remember that everyone has to do it.
Take breaks when it feels too much. Get out for some fresh air if possible.
Find out what works best for you. Do you need to have it on paper and write notes or do you work better with a screen?
Watch some YouTube videos on editing (not too many, don’t want to procrastinate!).
Ask a friend you trust to be a Beta reader when you feel ready, then when you get their feedback don’t respond straight away! (See my blog post on Critique!)
Set acheiveable goals. Decide you will edit for a certain amount of time and then have a break. Use the Nanowrimo website to set the goals and then you get a lovely goal tracker to keep an eye on how you’re doing. Reward yourself when you acheive them. Pre-Covid Sophie and I would reward ourselves with a Latte at Starbucks when we got somewhere!
Finally, give it to an editor. They are the best. You may not like them initially! But they will pick up on things that you don’t see. Like character arcs, holes in the plot and problems with tense or point of view.
The best thing, I’ve found, is to keep going. If I get particularly frustrated or bored then I go for a walk or pick up a book and read something completely different. Escape, when you get back it’s usually not as bad as you thought!
I’d love to hear your editing tips or stories! I’m sure I’m not the only one who hates editing!
I’ve not blogged for a couple of weeks with half term and family stuff going on but sitting to write this week I got thinking about beginnings.
In particular, novels and how they draw you in. As you’ll know from past posts I love to start new things and so when I start a novel I want to be caught up! It’s the same when I’m writing one. Some of my favourite novels start with such incredible first lines that I had to share some of them!
It’s hard for me to think about opening lines without referring to the classic ‘Pride and Prejudice’ – “A single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife!” Can that be beaten?!
Another book that doesn’t just have a great opening line – “I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.” but the whole first few pages are so beautifully written I had to read them aloud to Sean and insist that he agree with me that it was incredible prose! (You can feel sorry for him!) The book’s called ‘Shadow of the Wind’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
What’s interesting about Dickens is that as some of his novels were serialised in newspapers so the beginning of each chapter had to grip you to keep the reader intrigued! Probably my favourite Dickens (so far) is ‘Little Dorrit’ which starts ‘Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun one day.’ This beginning was one that meant I had so many questions it kept me reading.
I’ve been piling books onto my desk from the bookshelves around the house and realised that I could bore you with dozens of opening lines! But you can exhale because I won’t!
All this is to say, beginnings matter. Whether literary or life! Throw yourself into them and brace yourself for the journey your taking or being taken on. That’s my plan over the next few weeks as I think about the start of the school holidays, starting editing another novel, starting a new decade myself in September. Beginnings matter, whether big or small, I want to embrace the journey.
At the moment I have a couple of areas where I’m receiving regular critique. (Not including parenting where my kids give me daily feedback!) Receiving critique can be painful! However much we pretend we like it, and know it’s helpful, it’s still an ouch moment!
When it comes to writing, giving your work to someone to read is a moment filled with trepidation! You spent a long time putting together a story and you have no idea how it’s going to be received, but in the mind of the writer ‘it’s the perfect novel’! Until you get feedback!
The way I’ve learnt to handle feedback is to start by allowing myself to get emotional about it! I’m a crier! I may shed a few tears, mourn what I thought it was! Then after a couple of days, (it used to be a couple of weeks!), I reread it and react.
My writing partner Sophie reminds me feedback can be put into three categories, accept, adapt or ignore. The initial temptation can be to ignore it all! Maybe they just didn’t get it! Or accept it all, decide you’re no good and give up! But usually there’s a little bit of each.
Accepting means making the change they suggest. Adapt can mean understanding their meaning but not taking their solution. A lot of feedback falls into this category. Sometimes it’s a case of the reader or hearer not understanding where you’re trying to get to and so their solution doesn’t fit, or what they’ve pointed out is a minor issue but actually points to something bigger that needs fixing. Painful!
Finally, ignore, I’m very careful with this one and only ignore if I know it’s not correct. For example it could be that someone has struggled with something that others haven’t or it could be that a more experienced eye or ear is able to help you dismiss it. But be careful with this one!
Overall I would say that it’s so important to receive critique, it keeps you humble! Be careful who you ask, you don’t want only people who are going to tell you how amazing you are but equally you don’t want anyone who is going to shatter your confidence entirely!
Critique will challenge you but ultimately, if you let it, make you better at whatever it is you’re doing. Embrace the pain, allow yourself to be upset but wait to respond!
Rachel Theunissen 